Friday, February 15, 2013

Sorry, that was what ran through my head when I saw the footage of the meteor that hit Russia. I think comets have been called the Finger of God, but this fucking thing looked like the middle finger of Cthulu. I half expected to see giant walkers emerging and incinerating everyone in sight save for Tom Cruise (thanks for adding insult to injury, assholes).

However, because this happened in Russia, a place with #realproblems rather than #whitepeopleproblems, the populace seemed to react much more calmly than we would have. The first video Gawker posted showed a guy driving along when the sky EXPLODES, and he’s all meeti ori bork bork! or whatever he was saying in his Ruskie Fuskie language. Maybe that’s one of the side effects of having your cranial fluid be 97% Stoli. Or maybe, being Russian, he’s not going to get terribly agitated unless he sees a column of advancing Panzers, agricultural collectivization, or an unattended pallet of blue jeans. Because if this happened in, say, Los Angeles, I’m pretty sure the LAPD would have immediately started shooting minorities on the off chance they had become irradiated space zombies.

1) “Backwater,” Meat Puppets. God apparently hates Siberia almost as much as dinosaurs and uppity archangels who think they know everything. I’m surprised Republicans didn’t issue a press release declaring this a divine endorsement of America.

2) “The Long and Winding Road,” The Beatles. My least favorite Beatles song of the “good” Beatles songs. I feel like this should play at the end of a Bond movie where he drops flowers on the graves of his nemesis Dr. I.M. DeBagge and the sultry femme fatale Gina Spott at the end of Silent But Deadly, before turning and walking away with the bikini-clad German double-agent Uma Schtupewe to cash in the chips he won playing baccarat by the pool.

3) “Metropolis,” The Church. The best one-liner I saw regarding the Pope stepping down was a caption that read, “Pulls out early, like a good Catholic.” Seriously, how sad was it to be funny before the Internet. Imagine at the beginning of the Depression, you take a picture of the president and put the caption, “Nothing sucks like a Hoover,” and all you could do was share it with the other hobos in the boxcar. Sad. Also, you wouldn't be able to find the hard-to-find MTV Unplugged version of this song within two clicks of your fingers.

4) “Starrider,” Foreigner. You know you’re in for a big fat bag of musical suck within three notes. It gets even worse when the goddammed harpsichord emerges out of nowhere like a flare up of classical herpes. There would be less progressive cheese if you made figurines of every single member of Yes out of blocks of Velveta.

6) “Acrobat,” U2. Libby is taking gymnastics, and God help her, she’s already taller than Mary Lou Reton. We just had to retire her size six clothes because she’s too tall for them, and she won’t turn five until June. The good news is that she’s also taking tae kwan do, and she’s got reach on the other kids in her class. When she sweeps a leg, it’s going to stay swept.

7) “The Sound of Settling,” Death Cab for Cutie. Now that we are squarely in the era of divorce in our lives, any marriage dissolution among friends and acquaintances tends to trigger a discussion of how much it would suck if we found ourselves “back out there.” We would be especially screwed because we got married around the age of 12 (approximately), so neither of us has any clue what you do on a grown-up date. I could probably handle dinner okay, assuming my date likes dick jokes (I’d pre-screen on OK Cupid), but then I’d be like “So, how does a movie and some under-the-bra action sound? Wait, where are you going? Does this mean I can eat your dessert?” A house cat parachuting into the African savanna would have a better chance of survival than I would.

8) “Out of the Silent Planet,” King’s X. I want to get out the part about King's X being a seriously underrated band with a special shout out for finding a perfect guitar sound between clean and crunchy, and take a moment to express a real white people problem: iTunes 11 is awful. This is a dumb thing to rant about, but given that I work at home and I have music on probably 75% of the time I’m working, I use iTunes all the time. One thing I always loved while doing the Random 11 was setting iTunes to cover view, because the album covers would flip like you were looking at a real album collection instead of collection of JPEGs in varying degrees of pixilation. Yes, I am easily amused. Well, not only did that go away, but my library doesn’t even follow the shuffle now, only the tiny little status bar shows what’s being played. Maybe there’s a way to change it, but the M.C. Escher-designed menus all lead to a button that says "Suck it" in an admittedly glamorous sans serif font. Even the side scrolling bar doesn’t show up when you open iTunes, you have to minimize it, then maximize it, something that confused me for hours until I used the Internet to find the solution. (Disclaimer: I’m Polish and will swear my undying fealty if you can change a lightbulb.) Then I get mad at myself for getting mad over such stupid stuff when there are real problems like DEADLY METEORITES HEADING RIGHT TOWARD US, but then I see ABBA being displayed when Warren Zevon is playing and the cycle of rage begins anew. I will not last long when civilization collapses.

9) “A Legal Matter,” The Who. The amount of casual chauvinism in some of the music I like is disconcerting. I mean, if I’m queuing up some Winger, I know that the chorus I’m singing is at least one year removed from legally acceptable if still morally questionable attitudes toward women. You know what to expect from a guy named Kip. But then I’ll hear something like this from a paragon of rock godliness, a jaunty FU to an ex-wife and it’s little jarring. It was worse the other day when I heard Rod Stewart’s “Stay With Me,” which features an irresistible bit of dirty guitar boogie coupled with lyrics about him using an unattractive woman for sex due to a lack of any other serviceable option. So I guess the question is, as long as I know better, it’s still okay for me to sing, right? What if I do the dishes without being prompted?

10) “309,” Russian Circles. Ha, have to hand it to iTunes, it has a great sense of humor. Another thing about the meteor crash: could you imagine the conspiracy theories in this country if it happened here? It would be an alien vessel, a fallen angel, a test of a new UN Gay Ray that turns everyone homosexual so that humans die out and the trees win, God’s rebuttal to the State of the Union, a new marketing campaign to drum up purchases at Sunglasses Hut…anything but a meteor. And if we had advance notice, how many Americans would be on their lawns shooting at it? Because the only thing that can stop bad gravity with a giant space rock is a good guy with a gun.

11) “Wild Horses,” The Sundays. TLB made her famous “horse show” cookies, which are like chocolate chip cookies mixed with orgasm. They are huge and probably have enough calories per cookie to induce a heart attack if saw that number. She made some for her class and left “a few” for us. “A few” in the house with the man who is home all day and has no visible coworkers to shoulder some of the cookie consumption or at least threaten to brand him with a scarlet C on his chest if he was found in the supply room covered in cookie crumbs and shame. I ate four yesterday, and that was with me exercising John The Baptist levels of dietary restraint. We could just bake a batch for the CIA to use during interrogations and we would know every Al Qaeda plan by the second bite.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

BIZZAROWORLD, USA – During the middle of a prewritten Republican rebuttal to President Obama’s state of the union address, Florida Senator Marco Rubio made an unexpected detour when he excused himself to use the bathroom.

After discussing the need to cut taxes, improve Medicare, and enact a number of other budgetary and social welfare policies that are completely at odds with each other, Senator Rubio stated, “In the short time I’ve been in Washington, I’ve been frustrated by…by….uh oh,” as he held his right hand over his lower torso. He then uttered under his breath, “Chipotle before my big speech. What was I thinking? Stupid, stupid!” He took a deep breath, spun on one heel, and retreated to the bathroom.

When the cameras remained focused on the empty space where the senator was supposed to be, he called for them to follow and “continue the dialog.” The crew followed him to the lavatory door, which Rubio had left wide open as he prepared to use the facilities. A quick reaction from a key grip to close the door saved the situation from becoming a national trauma.

“Where was I? Oh yeah, frustrated,” Rubio continued. “It has been….difficult…to deal with the…gridlock…that the president and….Democrats….have used to block the…the…oh, God…passage….of key reforms….whew.” Rubio then laid out five key strategies for successful bipartisan action on America’s most pressing issues, all of which were inaudible due to the sound of him washing his hands and the toilet flushing twice.

At that point, Senator Rubio emerged, took a sip of water, and closed his address by saying, “Thank you for listening. May God bless all of you, may God bless our president, and may God continue to bless America, especially with ample supplies of Charmin and Pepto-Bismal.”

After a moment of silence, he said to the crew, “Wow, I just put the butt in rebuttal, boys. Seriously, don’t go in there if you value your eyebrows. Hey, why is that light on the camera still red?”

Friday, February 08, 2013

1) “Train in Vain,” The Clash. I read a piece on Grantland about Metallica that had a much more interesting subsection on the splintering of rock music. It talked about the divide between elitist taste and mainstream taste, and there’s a tidbit about how, in 1981, CBS Records own president wanted to push The Clash’s Sandinista!, while the PR guys were pushing REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity. Well, it was no contest who won—the public’s going to go for stories about cautionary tales of hearing third-hand gossip from one’s so-called friends over funky six-minute songs about cops kicking gypsies on the pavement. However, as someone who likes both The Clash and REO Speedwagon, I felt like a child caught in a musical custody battle. Here was the productive, admirable parent, the one making me do my homework but also making me a better person. And then there’s fun parent, who loves ripping off guitar solos almost as much as donuts in the parking lot. However, we all agreed that Uncle Metallica had devolved into a bitter asshole.

2) “Pacific Theme,” Broken Social Scene. I would have given a lot to be near anything Pacific yesterday, as I shoveled not only snow, but the water from the rain that fell before changing into snow and then getting covered like a Burmese tiger trap for my lower back muscles. Then again, I’ll take Midwestern weather over living amid rampaging ex-LAPD members who sound like the love child of The Punisher and Ted Kaczynski.

3) “Love, Hate, Love,” Alice in Chains. Seriously, have you read Psycho Cop’s manifesto? It’s disturbing because 95% of it is normal. At least with a Kaczynski or Manson, you know within three sentences/30 seconds that you’ve just sailed into Cape Crazy. Oh, The White Album is really about inciting a race war in America? Say, let’s get you a straight jacket. You look about a 40 Slim. But Psycho Cop starts out with an airing of grievances that’s cogent, lucid, and more polite than any YouTube thread. Except that, after rationally laying out his arguments, he decides the best solution is to murder those who wronged him and maybe their families. It’s done so casually that it’s way more jarring than any Zodiac code. He repeats this approach a few times, especially, after making great points about need for gun control, he says he’s going to illustrate his argument by killing people with his legally purchased guns. But the REALLY crazy part is when he spends a half dozen pages at the end thanking random public figures and celebrities, including this doozy:

It's kind of sad I won’t be around to view and enjoy The Hangover Ill. What an awesome trilogy. Todd Phillips, don't make anymore hangovers after the third, takes away the originality of its foundation.

That’s A) nuts to include after rambling about using asymmetrical warfare against the police and B) clearly the sign of a disturbed mind if you want to see another Hangover movie after the abortion that was the second. Anyway, in seriousness, it’s fucking frightening and sad that this guy already killed people and that the cops shot up a truck with two women in it. It’s bad when L.A. Confidential seems like a more flattering portrait of the LAPD.

4) “I’m Always in Love,” Wilco. There’s a great old-school synthesizer that really makes this song (and sadly a little buried on the version on YouTube). It’s funny how, in the context of a Jeff Tweedy pop gem, that synthesizer sounds warm and female-friendly, whereas when it’s used to punctuate an immortal man trapped in caves of ice, it’s an airhorn that chases 99 out of 100 vaginas away. Unrelated: I would love to have an old school synth sound be the horn on my car. I would just lay on it traffic and make people think they were stuck in front of ELP's tourbus.

5) “Electric Fever,” Free Energy. Libby has started ice skating, and we had the discussion about how I ice skated a few times when I was a kid. I explained that it wasn’t that hard because I roller skated a lot, and that led to further explanation that I and my friends would sometimes gather for a party and go in circles around an oval on shoes with wheels attached. For the first time in 30 years, I had the desire to slap on some skates and spend the evening listening to 70s rock while trying to get the courage to ask Mary Lou Chestblossom if I could hold her hand while we went round in circles. Anyway, this song would not sound at all out of place on a night like that.

6) “Sierra Leone,” Frank Ocean. I’m surprised that I liked this album as much as I did, because I do not have much hop in my hip. But there’s a death metal parallel that explains it. I loves me some metal, but a lot of speedyblackdeath metal doesn’t appeal to me because the singers sound like they replaced their vocal chords with a garbage disposal. Yet the exact same song with clean-sounding vocals wins me over almost every time. Frank Ocean does the same for me. The arrangements are very hip-hop and R&B, but because he’s got such a great voice, I’m totally won over. I hope he cleans up at the Grammys.

7) “Stepping Out,” Joe Jackson. The Lovely Becky and I see about 1-2 non-animated moves in the movie theater per year. Last weekend, we finally arranged to see Zero Dark Thirty, with one of our lovely friends no less. A real grown-up evening, with unflinching depictions of torture and everything! Even a serious wrenching of TLB’s back a couple days before didn’t stop our quest for mature entertainment that didn’t involve talking chipmunks. In fact, TLB had some leftover Hillbilly Heroin from an earlier malady, so she popped those to get her back into a non-stress position. Well, after dinner and about 40 minutes into the movie, she began to feel an insurgency in her stomach and excused herself. A few minutes later, we got the text that it was time to accelerate our timetable for withdrawal. I don’t think you could have found a pair of parents who more closely resembled dejected four-year olds. Robbed! Plus I have no idea how the movie ended? Did they find the guy they were looking for?

8) “When You Sleep,” My Bloody Valentine. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to get more sleep. I honestly am so much in the Do As I Say, Not As I Do parent camp, especially regarding sleep. Libby is at the age where she often fights or tries to cajole her way out of going to bed. She’ll get up for the third time and, just as my patience is about to end, tells me that the reason she got up was to tell me she loves me. (My heart melts, and I instantly hand her a sixer of Jolt Cola and initiate a Chipmunk movie marathon.) Yet I, the adult, fight going to bed so much, I had to make a specific resolution to go the fuck to sleep. A month in, I think I’ve gone to bed before midnight once or twice, and those were only after collapsing like a broken CIA detainee. I wake up tired and convinced that tonight’s going to be the night for that reasonable 11 pm bedtime, and 60 minutes past that, I’m saving the galaxy, liking status updates, or just flipping two birds at the clock because I’m all growns up and can do whatever I want. I am an idiot. Unrelated tangent: With a new My Bloody Valentine album released after 20+ years, I would not have wanted to be the one cleaning the men's bathroom at the Pitchfork offices this week.

9) “Handsome Devil,” The Smiths. Like a zillion other people, I also resolved to lose some weight this year. Fatherhood has not only made me soft and weak, but my Dagwood Bumstead eating habits have me on medications to dilute the ranch dressing flowing through my arteries. One element of that is to be on a beef ban—I have cut out red meat (MY PRECIOUS!) from my diet quite a bit, saving it only for a couple times a month, tops. I had one of those occasions at TLB’s parents’ house. We had a big family dinner with steaks as the main course. I didn’t want to be rude, so I made an exception. One of the steaks was done very rare, just brown on the top and bottom and the color of murder in the middle. I picked that one, because I wanted to experience every bloody, beefy bit of flavor. My mother-in-law saw it and offered to zap it in the microwave, and I nearly stabbed her with my knife. I wasn’t about to irradiate even one parcel of Beef County in Flavor Country with some dirty bomb cooking. The best was TLB sitting next to me in horror as I savored every bite. It was so sinfully good, I felt like my mouth was committing adultery.

10) “All Day,” Ministry. The old Eurotrash Ministry, back when they would let their songs be used in beer commercials (Old Style, if I remember correctly). Okay, a beef related-tangent: TLB and I were watching Cougar Town (hilarious show), and one of the storylines had a character dishing out hamburgers from a truck stand along with insults to the customers. She became known as the “Burger Bitch.” I immediately had the idea to start a chain called Roast Beef where customers get comedy roasted by the cashiers while placing their orders. Someone would come in and order a double burger, and the cashier would say something like, This will be the most beef you’ve had in your mouth since Fleet Week. If I had the money, I would have immediately drawn up the business plan and started constructing the first of what would be a nationwide fleet of insult food joints. So it’s a good thing I don’t have that money.

11) “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” The Darkness. Yes! Fire! The first time I heard this, I was surprised at how the singer could hit those crazy falsetto notes. Then I saw how tight his spandex body suit was and I wished I had only heard the record. The Post Traumatic Spandex Disorder has passed, though, so I can once again enjoy this puff pastry of rock ridiculousness.

Friday, February 01, 2013

I apologize for anyone who is friends with me on The Facebook and saw this already, but I have to share an idea I had for the 30 Rock finale:

Tina Fey wakes up on the set of Saturday Night Live as Lorne Michaels shocks her back to consciousness with a cattle prod and tells her to get back to work. Alec Baldwin is guest starring and is rehearsing the voice for a CEO character he's playing in a sketch with Will Arnett, while Keenan Thompson is in costume as Tracy Morgan.

She gets up to walk back down the hall, where she bumps into Jane Krakowski, who is playing a dim-witted singer and the wife of Dean Winters's structural engineer/private detective character in NBC's new country drama, "Nashville Bridges." She asks herself if it was all just a dream just as she runs into newly-hired SNL writer Judah Friedlander, who wears a hat that says "IT WAS A DREAM." The camera pans up toward the ceiling, where we see Lutz in the shadows, a Phantom of the Opera mask covering his face, as he says, "Or was it?" before taking a bite of a Blimpie sub.

I am really going to miss that show. I will not spoil the finale, which was very good, except to say that there was a rant from Lutz that caused The Lovely Becky and I to pause the DVR and spend five minutes trying to stop laughing. I also enjoyed this good piece on race in 30 Rock that ran on Grantland. The slapstick and rapid-fire silliness on 30 Rock could make it easy to overlook the bite of some of the gags, but watching the show in reruns now, it’s easier to see just how cutting the punchlines could be. Oh, how I will miss things like Alec Baldwin playing Thomas Jefferson as Tracy Morgan’s father or Tina Fey’s youth flashbacks or anything involving Lutz.

1) “Communication Breakdown,” Led Zeppelin. We had a power outage here a couple days ago, and every time the power goes out, I immediately think What the fuck am I going to do now? I can’t work. I can’t cook. Approximately 95 percent of my entertainment options are erased, 100 percent if it happens at night and I can’t read. And the stupid Revolution show that I watched for three bulimic Hunger Games episodes now makes me take stock of how well I could survive a world without power, which I would say would be seventeen minutes past sundown. My daughter is better equipped to deal with a power outage because at least she’d think it was neat instead of the beginning of a new age of feudalism. Luckily the power came back on after five minutes and I was safe again.

2) “2 Late 4 Love,” Tesla. I can forgive and even enjoy a lot of social media abbreviations and illiterate LOLCATtery. In fact, TLB loves to give me a kthxbai on text messages just to annoy me. But I cannot trunk numbers substituted for words. It’s cat nails on a LOLboard, and even Prince doing it drives me nuts.

3) “Foolin’,” Def Leppard. iTunes has got the T-top open in the Firebird today. Goddamn I love every song on Pyromania, and this one in particular has it all: super thick drum fills, cowbell, an acoustic guitar that gives it a ballad-fake out before the rocking commences, and an apostrophe’d ‘g. Yes, I hate numerical word substitution, but I love to drop my ‘g’s, because that’s fuckin’ rock and roll.

4) “Hemispheres,” Rush. No other song makes it more difficult to be a Rush fan. This is eighteen minutes of the proggiest of the proggy, a story of Dionysius and Apollo fighting for control of mankind, with the debate moderated by a mortal who arrives via a black hole from a song on the previous Rush album. I have explained this to TLB on several occasions, and each time she stops what she’s doing and does a laughing facepalm while shaking her head in a fashion that says I can’t believe I have sex with this. I would love to have a competition where Rush fans play this for their significant others and then attempt to have sex before the song ends. I guarantee if it doesn’t happen during the first three minutes of “I: Prelude,” before Geddy sings, When our weary world was young / The stuggle of the ancients first began / the gods of love and reason / sought to rule the fate of man, it's over. In fact, by the time you reach the lines The cities were abandoned / And the forests echoed song / They danced and lived as brothers / They knew love could not be wrong during “III: Dionysius, Bringer of Love,” there’s a pretty good chance a woman will become instantly menopausal.

And still I love every 20-sided minute of it. No other song puts me in touch with my inner geek the way this one does. I was ecstatic to find the album not only being discussed during the Rush documentary, but also to discover additional footage about this discussion stuck in the extras, because prolonged exposure to Hemispheres can kill mere mortals who have not been properly conditioned to handle it. If they played this in concert, there is no doubt that Becky would be bailing me out of jail after I was arrested for rushing (ha!) the stage and hugging Geddy’s Taurus pedals.

6) “Night,” Zola Jesus. I love a good, freaky album cover, and I got this EP precisely because the woman on it (presumably Ms. Jesus) looks like she just tried to break up with the thing from Stephen King’s “The Raft” and he responded by getting extra clingy. My God, this relationship is so suffocating!

7) “Shine Like It Does,” INXS. They just called it quits, but I don’t know how they could have kept it going after Michael Hutchence died. Sometimes a band can pull off the singer switch (AC/DC comes to mind), but usually they should just pack it in, especially with a band like INXS where the singer was the identity of the band. No disrespect to the other members, who wrote fine music, but INXS doesn’t grab you because of Kirk Pengilly’s multi-instrumental talents. If you get another singer, have the courtesy to change the name to something like CHIN-XS.

8) “Amazing Journey/Sparks, (Live)” The Who. Tuesday nights, TLB takes the Libster up to her parents’ to spend the night because my mother-in-law watches her on Wednesdays. I have been using those Tuesday nights to get out and work on my novel, which usually goes very well. However, it was colder than a Hemispheres coitus session last week, so I decided to stay home and write. I grabbed my laptop, sat on the couch, and threw Live at Leeds in the big stereo, getting the proper Entwistling I can only get when I’m home alone with the subwoofer cranked. I also decided to pour a glass of Scotch, because that’s what writers do, right? Well, halfway through The Who’s seminal show, I was grooving and air drumming more than typing, which I think had more to do with fueling up the rock-it ship than with being at home and enjoying the best rock show ever recorded. I will be returning to my regularly scheduled Starbucks-at-7PM writing.

9) “I Might,” Wilco. One of the great 30 Rock lines is when Queen Latifah (as a Congresswoman) asks Alec Baldwin why NBC, “looks as diverse as a Wilco concert?” Hey now, I saw old and young white people of both genders at that show.

10) “Heartbreaker,” Alabama Shakes. I really like these guys, they play great, soulful rock with a ton of heart. But I always feel ten years older when I hear this album, as if I should be in The Big Chill 2: #iStalgia where we put our first-generation iPods on shuffle and reminisce about how we used to be able to check in for our flights at the gate and have affairs without somebody talking about it on Facebook.

11) “Search and Destroy,” Iggy and the Stooges. This song makes me want to be in a Huey screaming over the treetops of a war zone. I don’t want to actually kill anyone, but maybe shoot them with a Gatling version of a T-shirt cannon. Tell me that wouldn’t win some hearts and minds, if a big ass Huey appeared over some mountaintop and rained down a hail of shirts that said "Osama Don’t Surf" and included a free two-month gold subscription to Xbox Live and 10% off a footlong Jihadistrami sandwich at Subway. We’d solve terrorism by next Tuesday.

Have a good weekend, and here’s hoping Ray Lewis can play in a Super Bowl without killing someone.